The MindBrain is the living, learning, self-modifying system through which we perceive, remember, interpret and act.
Not just the brain. Not a ghost in the machine.
One thing: biology and mind, continuously reshaped by experience, action and other people.
Today's question: what does it copy — and what decides what it copies?
Copy — imitation, habituation & habit, memorization & recall
Change — plasticity, association, generalization, variation & recombination
Choose — attention, prediction, metacognition
Ten capacities. Each one is a door through which a meme can enter, mutate — or be thrown out.
Host — it carries patterns it did not invent
Replicator — it repeats them: speech, gesture, drawing, habit
Mutator — it misremembers, reinterprets, recombines
Selector — it ignores most things and passes on a few
Product — its tastes and beliefs are partly made of memes
Same organ, five jobs.
Five volunteers. The first reads this text, hides it, and writes it down from memory for the next. Nobody sees the original.
On the third night the fox crossed the frozen river carrying seven blue apples, and nobody in the village believed the child who saw it.
We come back to it at the end.
Replication + Variation + Selection
Replication — imitation
Variation — play, curiosity, dreaming, forgetting, Fehlleistungen
Selection — Bandura says: mostly other people
True. But those people are primates with bodies. What do they select for?
Before it is a student, an artist or a meme host, the MindBrain belongs to an animal that has to:
eat
mate
stay safe
stay in the group — rank, grooming, coalitions, gossip: chimp-like business
Every meme has to get past these four gatekeepers.
“An instinctive trend.”
Jung: archetypes are inborn tendencies to form certain images — Mother, Child, Hero, Shadow, Trickster, Wise Old Man.
Not a blueprint, but a tendency. “As marked as the impulse of birds to build nests.”
Read memetically: archetypes are the MindBrain's pre-installed selection filters, the shape that food, sex, danger and tribe took in the imagination.
Stories that fit the filter spread. Stories that don't, die quietly.
The ones that feed a need or press an archetype.
Food videos. Sex appeal. Outrage and threat. Gossip and rank. Belonging.
Hero stories, villain stories, the trickster's joke.
Think of the last thing you forwarded.
Which gatekeeper let it through?
Hebb: cells that fire together wire together. Dopamine decides which firing counts.
Dopamine is not the pleasure molecule.
It is the wanting molecule: go, get it, again. Liking is another system (Berridge).
Food, sex, safety, standing: the body pays for all four in the same currency.
It also teaches: it decides which connections get strengthened.
Dopamine reports better than expected, not reward (Schultz).
Expected and delivered: silence. Unexpected: burst. Expected and missing: dip.
That is how habits — and feeds — are built.
And a smile, praise, a good reputation, a like pay out in the same currency as food (Izuma).
A meme that predicts social reward gets copied.
See → do.
Macaque premotor cortex (Rizzolatti, Parma): the same neurons fire when the monkey grasps and when it sees a grasp.
A neural footprint of imitation: see → do.
Warning: popular claims race far ahead of evidence. Cecilia Heyes: mirror responses may themselves be learned, by being imitated.
The copying machine may be built by memes.
Before any input: spontaneous kicks, spontaneous neural firing — variation with no outside cause.
From about the 25th week the fetus hears. Newborns know their mother's voice, prefer a story read to them in late pregnancy, and cry in the melody of their language.
Is the first meme a melody — and the first thing learned what is safe?
Milk, warmth, a face: food and safety arrive bundled with a person.
Smile at six weeks. Serve and return. Tronick's still face: stop responding and the baby protests, then withdraws.
Do newborns imitate? Meltzoff 1977: yes. A 2016 study of 106 infants: no. Open question.
Parents are the first selectors — with the body's blessing.
Kuhl: nine-month-olds relearn Mandarin sounds from a live person — not from a video of the same person.
Over-imitation: children copy even useless steps. Chimps skip them.
Humans over-copy. That is how culture accumulates instead of leaking away.
Bobo doll, 1961: children saw an adult hit it — and hit it too.
Model rewarded: more imitation. Model punished: less (1965).
Attention → retention → reproduction → motivation.
Even watching someone else's outcome fires prediction-error signals (Burke).
You can be selected without doing anything: by watching who gets punished.
Those who look at us and speak slowly. The majority. The successful. The similar — same accent, same group.
Children track who has been right before.
Primate rules: rank, kin, coalition.
Selection is social because we are social primates.
Play is copying with mistakes allowed.
Children explore more and exploit less than adults (Gopnik).
Curiosity pays: information itself is rewarded by dopamine.
Variation is not noise. It is the MindBrain paying itself to try something new.
Babies spend about half of their sleep in REM. Dreams remix what the day stored — why exactly, nobody knows.
Forgetting is fast: Ebbinghaus's curve. Before age three: almost nothing stays.
Bartlett: retell a story and it bends toward the teller's habits.
What we forget is also a selection — and a mutation.
Versprechen, Verlesen, Vergessen, Verlieren: Freud's VER-.
Not random: a second plan breaking through the first.
Children say “goed” and “mouses”: a rule applied too well.
Mondegreens: “Lady Mondegreen” instead of “laid him on the green”.
A slip is a mutation where two patterns collide. Which one did you make this week?
Reward sensitivity peaks, self-control matures later.
Teens take more risks when peers watch (Chein). A “like” lights up the reward system (Sherman).
In Jung's language: Anima and Animus, the image of the other, are projected on real people.
Subcultures, slang, scenes: memeplexes with a sex- and status-engine.
The prefrontal cortex keeps maturing into the mid-twenties.
Metacognition: I notice that I am copying.
Shadow: what I deny in myself I project onto others.
The host can learn to choose its diet.
The last version of the chain versus the original: what dropped, what was added, what became more typical?
Which gatekeeper did it: food, sex, danger, group? Which archetype or story pattern?
Now find one meme from today.
Which need does it feed?
Replication: imitation, with a body that mirrors.
Variation: play, curiosity, dreams, forgetting, slips.
Selection: other people, driven by bodies that want food, sex, safety and the herd — paid in dopamine.
Questions, detours and objections welcome.